‘The Diplomat’ Star Rufus Sewell On Hal’s Major Season 2 Screw Up & What’s To Come: “It Has Devastating Consequences”

Katie Campione
·8-min read

SPOILER ALERT! This post contains details from the second season of The Diplomat.

The first season of Netflix’s The Diplomat ended with an explosion in the heart of London that left the fate of several characters up in the air. Season 2 has once again ended on huge cliffhanger, only this time, it’s a metaphorical bomb that’s left things in disarray — and it’s all thanks to Rufus Sewell’s Hal Wyler.

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Season 2 saw Keri Russell’s Kate Wyler continue investigating both the attack of a British aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf and the car bombing that killed Parliament member Merritt Grove and left her husband Hal and deputy chief of mission Stuart Hayford (Ato Essandoh) severely injured. And as she got closer to the truth, she realized it might mean much more than she initially realized.

As the mystery unfolds, it becomes clear that U.S. Vice President Grace Penn (Alison Janney) was behind the attacks, which finally pushes Kate to pursue the VP position that her husband and several other political allies have encouraged her to go for since she began her post in London. Just as Kate is coming around to the idea, it looks as though it may become a reality.

That is, until Hal takes things into his own hands by informing the President of Penn’s transgressions. The shock is so great, it kills him. That’s right. The President in dead, and Penn has ascended to Commander in Chief.

Sewell spoke with Deadline about what is, perhaps, Hal’s biggest screw up to date, what it means for him and Kate, and where things might go in Season 3 (which has already been ordered and is currently in production).

DEADLINE: I’m excited to be chatting with you, especially because I’m happy that Hal is even alive. Did you know at the end of Season 1 that Hal would survive?

RUFUS SEWELL: Yes, they were kind not to do that, so I had been assured. I mean, the idea otherwise reminds me in a very funny way, when I was young… I think it was Dynasty, they had a big explosion. I can’t remember the show, actually, but it was unclear who survived and what happened. I think it was a tactic to stop any of the squabbling actors from being overzealous with their renegotiations, because no one would be quite sure if their head was on the chopping block or not. But it was nice to know that. I mean to tell you the truth, as far as I’m concerned, I was such a lover of the writing, if I’m a big fan of doing something that I love and stopping it, I’d always rather have my character blow up than be kept around afterwards in a kind of neutered fashion. My fear has never been being killed off in anything I’ve done. It’s being kept around after in a pointless fashion. But I trust the writing that that wouldn’t happen.

And what I always say to the producers, if my character is going to win, can you please let him lose straight after? Because there’s something really deadening about winners. It’s got to be about loss and difficulty and f*cking things up and things going wrong, expectations going the other way. It’s very boring to play someone who’s right, and so I love the trouble.

Since Game of Thrones, people are unsure of the ground on which they act, because part of me was like, that would be the baller move. And if that had been the move, I would have respected it, but they would have given me some nice cushioning warning and a couple of really big, lovely scenes before it happens.

DEADLINE: Well, it’s funny you should mention that, since Hal really does screw up in a big way at the end there.

SEWELL: A big bone of contention between them is that he, famously, in their world, has an incredible reputation for pulling off feats that were just unimaginable…an ability to see something and without worrying for the consequences of it going wrong, shooting for it with great success and occasionally without, and the ability to kind of block out the compunction about about the effects on other people, in order to carry these things through. In some cases, that’s a sign of greatness. Also, the lack of care, seeming care, for collateral damage, if things go wrong, has been a big contention for them. Part of the story of Season 2 is that she sees herself now that actually it does come with a job. She’s beginning to see herself like him, and it makes her angry. So the thing that he does at the end is one of those things, the right call and, if you’re the president, the only things that reach your desk are 50/50 decisions, because if it’s if it’s 48/52 then that’s easy, right? So this is a case of him making the right call, [but also] the wrong call because of what happens, and it has devastating consequences.

DEADLINE: I figured when we saw Hal talking to the president, this was going to backfire on him, but I just really did not expect that the president would die! What was your reaction to reading that script for the first time?

SEWELL: The thing that hits you is the brilliance of the drama of it. When I first read these scripts, it was the dynamic of the relationship, the humor that got me. ‘The audience will love it,’ I was thinking. But actually, the more extraordinary the terms of the story are and the weight and the dynamic of the tectonic shifts in the situation around them, the more it highlights that thing that I love about their essential relationship. It just gives you something more. The context for your quieter and funnier moments is all the more rich. So it gives me what I love as well. I thought the cliffhanger at the end of Season 1 was like a kind of, ‘Oh, I see what you’re doing.’ And [the cliffhanger] into Season 3, oh, my God. But I love it, because it just gives us more and more texture.

DEADLINE: At the end of Season 2, Kate is confronted with this idea that her attraction to Hal is in part due to his ‘misbehavior’ or his tendency to break the rules. Do you think that is a factor?

SEWELL: Oh, it most certainly does. In a relationship, you can meet someone and your neurosis shake hands under the table, unbeknownst to you. These weird little contracts are signed without our knowing, and everything that is right has the seeds of everything that is wrong, and they get mixed up. And in my experience, not just from my own life, but looking at the world, wanting someone to change is the same instinct as wanting to obliterate someone in that it can be the case that when someone finally does make the shift that you have been pushing them to make, it is your moment of release. It doesn’t necessarily mean that that is the beginning of your new relationship. It could signal the end.

Sometimes the things we tell ourselves that we like, we tell us ourselves that we want, and we tell ourselves there are reasons, just little comforting narratives unconsciously constructed for ourselves, when the opposite could have just as strong a magnetic pull. I think that is not just true of them. I think it’s true in a lot of relationships, and it’s definitely true that what you might call the worst of them is also the best of them. That’s why their rouse and their political scheming is caught up with their sex and it’s all part of it. They don’t have to stop talking about politics to get horny.

DEADLINE: To your point, that scene in Season 2 right after she finally admits she wants to be VP…

SEWELL: Right? Game recognizes game. People ask me if this part has changed the way I think, but it’s more the case of I read something and suddenly I pull together a load of half-projected thoughts that I’ve had all the way through my life, that suddenly come together in a crystallization of something that I’m reading. So it’s a recognition of something you didn’t know you knew. I remember seeing a clip of Obama and Bill Clinton backstage before they went on to charm everyone with their combined [charm] — you could see there was a bit of Dark Vader in both of them. They weren’t smiling at each other…to see the the necessary killer for the good in them both…when [Hal] sees that in Kate, he’s like, ‘That’s my girl.’ It’s not about bad versus good. It’s about, in order to do good, not be nice, in order to do good, you have to know also when to kill. I think that’s the parcel of the scene around the table with me, with him, Kate and Grace, where I go for her, it is the moment to take your political opportunity.

DEADLINE: Last season, you and Keri had a scene where she tackles you in the woods. This season, it’s wrestling on the bed. How is it to get that silly in a show with such serious stakes?

SEWELL: There’s a version of Keri that I call the fraggle, which is that thing that came at me through the bushes. She gets this little kind of ancient Greek glint in her eye…we were looking forward to it, because it was the moment that really sealed the tone for us. You might think of it as an extreme, but the tone for me is the shift between very real and serious and real and silly in the blink of an eye. Yes, we always love bits like that, but I saw that after that the seeds of that potential. It’s always there in the same way that the seeds of killing off a main character are always there for Game of Thrones onwards. There’s nothing about the tone of the scene that precedes it that means any better off. So when we do those things we do it all ourselves, but we work out some basic physical moves so that we can be completely free without anyone’s nether regions being crushed irretrievably, by which I mean mine. She’s the one that’s picking up branches and swinging them.

DEADLINE: So you’ve started production on Season 3. How has that been?

SEWELL: The end of the end of Season 2 is really something. It keeps on going from there…This is all just fantastic material. So far, we’re having so much fun. One thing is that now we’re doing a little bit in England, a little bit in America too, which is nice.

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